Marvels & Tales

Volume 23 | Issue 1 Article 14

4-1-2009 Reviews Marvels & Tales Editors

Recommended Citation Editors, Marvels & Tales. "Reviews." Marvels & Tales 23.1 (2009). Web. . 23385_13_175_208_r2ri.qxp 5/11/09 8:48 AM Page 175

REVIEWS 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Stars and Keys: Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean. By Lee 11 Haring with translations by Claude Ricaud and Dawood Auleear. Bloomington: Indi- 12 ana UP, 2007. xxv + 413 pp., preface, acknowledgments, chronology, 5 maps, photo- 13 graphs, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. 14 This is not your ordinary collection of folktales. After thirty years of work 15 in the multicultural islands of the Indian Ocean, Lee Haring offers us instead a 16 masterful translation (both linguistic and cultural) of storytelling across tradi- 17 tions, and a manifestation of what may well be called “creolized scholarship.” 18 Stars and Keys: Folktales and Creolization in the Indian Ocean is thus a fresh col- 19 lection of folktales in which traditions from Africa, South Asia, Europe, and 20 the Middle East blend together to produce a corpus of creolized verbal art. 21 Diverging from standard practice, Haring innovates on the well-known 22 genre of the “folktale collection volume” by joining his voice in a dialogic man- 23 ner with that of traditional old-time and current storytellers. In the preface, he 24 describes his presentation of the stories as follows, addressing the reader di- 25 rectly: “Some are cited without interruption; a few are translated only in part, 26 or summarized. Into others, I interpolate commentary as if I were reading to 27 you and then looking up to explain something from time to time.” 28 But more is going on here. Set in non-bold typeface to distinguish them 29 from the bold of the regional storytellers’ narrative, Haring’s comments are not 30 your standard fare of glosses, annotations, or marginal notes; they are woven 31 into the very flow of the stories themselves. To be sure, in many of the stories 32 Haring’s words far outnumber those of the actual tale. And though in the pref- 33 ace he wryly comments that the use of different typefaces allows us to clearly 34 distinguish voices in the text, thereby making it possible for the reader to “skip 35 the boring parts (whichever those are),” I for one discovered in the course of 36 reading that I looked forward as much to what Haring “looked up” to tell me 37 as to what was coming next in the story itself. In this respect, the author’s per- 38 formance of each tale is a new, enlightened version of local narratives (for the 39 first time in English) for an audience of readers beyond the Indian Ocean. 40 S 41 R

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1 Haring contextualizes and elucidates each tale, providing historical and 2 geographical facts, correspondences with important tale indexes, particulars 3 about the tellers, relevant details of literary and cultural scholarship, and the 4 like. More important, and perhaps more intriguing, however, we learn through 5 the reflections and insights provided by Haring how to think about these sto- 6 ries, how to process them as creole art, how to extrapolate from them to better 7 understand the larger culture, and how to relate them to the broader fields of 8 literature and literary criticism. Only a scholar fully versed and immersed in 9 the culture and narrative tradition of the Southwest Indian Ocean could have 10 attempted this feat with such authority and elegance. Indeed, Haring models 11 for us a form of “creolized” scholarship that uncovers a “creole aesthetic,” re- 12 quiring nothing less of him than a deep cultural intimacy with the region, a 13 discriminating capacity to both cross and collapse disciplinary boundaries, 14 and a finely honed understanding of the performance styles and poetics of this 15 cultural area. 16 Stars and Keys borrows its title, as Haring explains, from the Latin phrase 17 on the coat of arms of Mauritius: Stella Clavisque Maris Indici, The Star and Key 18 of the Indian Ocean. The author then puns on Stars, appropriating the word to 19 title a section of the volume that highlights storytellers (pictured in the book) 20 who are star performers. In another of the book’s five sections, titled “Keys,” he 21 plays on that word to identify tales that unlock a creole aesthetic. The opening 22 section of the book, composed primarily of “origin” narratives, takes its title 23 (“Land of the Man-Eating Tree”) from one of the stories. The section “Dias- 24 pora” follows, where Haring considers displacements and transpositions, pay- 25 ing important attention to (among other elements) “interperformance,” the 26 role of tricksters, and the dynamics and effects of translation. The collection 27 ends with the section labeled “Postcolonial Seychelles,” which begins with the 28 author’s wondering whether tales whose voices hark back to an ancient past 29 will be treated in contemporary post-emancipation times as “outmoded relics, 30 dull museum objects, quaint anthology pieces, or promising materials for re- 31 working.” About the larger questions facing all folklorists, as well as those 32 specifically concerning the Southwest Indian Ocean, he further inquires: “What 33 will globalizing influence do to inherited traditions? Will these old stories 34 evoke a nostalgic call to return to the inherited past, or will they become to- 35 kens in a free play of cultural goods without substance—in other words, in a 36 postmodern Seychelles?” 37 These and countless other provocative interrogations and reflections make 38 every page of Stars and Keys a rich and demanding text. Yet, despite his copi- 39 ous insights and commentary, Haring’s voice at no time overshadows the tradi- S 40 tion of the tale at hand; every storyteller and story in this collection of 121 R 41 folktales is clearly heard.

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The book contains other valuable supporting information (particularly for 1 those less familiar with this part of the world). A seven-page “Chronology of 2 the Southwest Indian Ocean” (from CE 500 to 2002) details the more conven- 3 tional epochs of the early settlements, European arrival, slavery, colonial pe- 4 riod, and independence, but also includes a less easily labeled period (dating 5 from 1835 to 1893) that Haring calls “Abolition, Indenture, Scholarship.” Five 6 maps drawn specifically for this volume situate and orient the reader in the ge- 7 ography and ethnic settlements of the Southwest Indian Ocean. Scholarly 8 notes organized by chapters at the end of the book, followed by nineteen pages 9 of works cited and an index, provide the academic apparatus not included in 10 (and hence not encumbering) the explications within the tales. These and 11 other references, such as the appendix of the “Indian Ocean Versions of the 12 ‘Defiant Girl’ (La Fille difficile), Cross Referenced to Numbering in Görög-Karady 13 and Seydou 2001,” make Stars and Keys an indispensable resource. 14 The only thing missing is the music of the songs, which “is left for some 15 future CD,” Haring writes. “As it’s a book of stories,” the author further notes, 16 “[Stars and Keys] says little about other forms of folklore still to be researched 17 in the islands: riddles, proverbs, poetry, oratory, song, music, dance, costume, 18 cookery.” Similarly unrepresented are some ethnic and language groups in the 19 islands, such as Chinese in Mauritius and Indians in Réunion. These will have 20 to await future research, he explains, underscoring the more urgent need to at- 21 tend to the folktale, for “[l]ike the novel of nineteenth-century Europe, the cre- 22 ole folktale is the dominant literary form of the Southwest Indian Ocean” and 23 thus “both reflects and influences how people live.” Moreover, the author feels 24 an urgency to make better known this literary corpus. “Now that capturing 25 and transmitting verbal art is so easy, with cheap recorders and the Internet, 26 ‘literature’ and ‘folklore’ will coalesce,” he notes, acknowledging further: “The 27 broadening of the literary canon requires a massive program of retrieval, to 28 which this book contributes.” 29 In sum, Stars and Keys provides a reassessment (indeed a recalibration) of 30 the status and relationship between folklore and literature, orality and writing, 31 in the world today. It further demonstrates that the “cultural creolization visi- 32 ble in places such as the Southwest Indian Ocean offers a model wherewith to 33 understand the cultural convergences of Europe and the rest of the postmod- 34 ern world.” 35 The contributions of Stars and Keys (both to the field and to a wider audi- 36 ence) are vast. While the book might appear at first sight to be “very special- 37 ized”—to echo the phrase used by a young French woman characterizing 38 Haring’s work in the volume’s opening anecdote, words that leave him feeling 39 “perceived, though not profoundly understood”—this study, in fact, will be of 40 S universal interest to all who are engaged in producing “any viable theory of world 41 R

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1 culture.” Indeed, by not merely perceiving, but in profoundly understanding 2 this remarkable book, readers will find themselves challenged to revise notions 3 of what literature is and what we as scholars of verbal art do. 4 Ana C. Cara 5 Oberlin College 6 7 Cinderella in America: A Book of Folk and Fairy Tales. Compiled and edited by 8 William Bernard McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. xiv + 9 514 pp., appendix, bibliography, 4 indexes, 18 photographs. 10 The turn of the millennium signaled a change in the way that scholars 11 and popularizers frame and package the folk narratives of the United States. 12 Twentieth-century “American” folktale collections focused overwhelmingly on 13 discrete traditions limited to a single state ( J. Russell Reaver’s Florida Folktales 14 [1988]), region (Vance Randolph’s six collections from the Ozark Mountains), 15 ethnicity ( Jerome Mintz’s Legends of the Hasidim [1968]), or some combination 16 thereof ( Jerome M. Carrière’s Tales from the French Folk-Lore of Missouri [1937]). 17 The few nationwide anthologies of the 1900s (such as Benjamin Botkin’s Trea - 18 sury of American Folklore [1944] and Kemp P. Battle’s Great American Folk- 19 lore [1986]) titled themselves with the term “folklore” rather than “folktale” 20 and mixed oral narratives with literary spinoffs and non-narrative genres. The 21 published record of the twentieth century implies that there is no real “Ameri- 22 can” tradition, but rather innumerable mutually isolated traditions shaped by 23 separate values and circumstances. 24 But since 2000, three large collections have attempted, in very different 25 ways, to embrace the whole sweep of American storytelling, and all identify 26 “folktales” (or, in McCarthy’s case, “folk tales”) in their titles. All, by design or 27 otherwise, display not only the diversity of the nation’s oral narrative traditions 28 but also their interconnectedness. Thomas Green’s Greenwood Library of Amer- 29 ican Folktales (four volumes, 2006), the largest and most expensive, breaks the 30 nation into eight regions and concentrates on written sources published before 31 1920. In contrast, Carl Lindahl’s American Folktales from the Collections of the 32 Library of Congress (two volumes, 2004) draws entirely on audio recordings 33 dating from 1933 to 2001, most previously unpublished, and focuses on the 34 narrators and their relationships with the collectors. 35 Most recent is William Bernard McCarthy’s Cinderella in America: A Book of 36 Fairy and Folk Tales. With 538 pages pressed into one paperback volume, Cin- 37 derella is easily the shortest and most affordable of the three. But the book’s size 38 is hardly a drawback, because McCarthy packs into it some 144 tales (each fol- 39 lowed by a useful discussion), along with a concise introduction explaining S 40 the purpose and range of the anthology, a strong introductory statement for R 41

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each of the book’s six sections, and back matter aimed at general readers and 1 specialists alike. 2 McCarthy distinguishes American tales from folktales that merely happen 3 to be told in America. He is express in his notion of e pluribus unum: “after 4 five hundred years on the continent and two hundred years under the Consti- 5 tution there is no longer any question that we are a distinct and distinctive 6 people with a distinct and distinctive set of . . . folkways . . . not yet wholly 7 shared . . . by the new immigrant” (12). McCarthy bypasses tales told by new 8 arrivals and turns instead to narrative communities that have inhabited the 9 country for generations and adapted their tales to New World environments. 10 As title references to Cinderella and fairy tales attest, McCarthy focuses on 11 oral fictions of European descent, those most closely cognate with the märchen 12 of the Brothers Grimm. The core of this repertoire is the magic tale, with its 13 kings and giants, and its unlikely protagonists who walk into a world of won- 14 ders as children and emerge from it as adults. But McCarthy’s anthology, like 15 the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, also embraces humorous narratives of fools and 16 numskulls (German schwänke), adventure tales similar to märchen but lacking 17 magical elements (Thompson’s novelle), animal and formula tales, and texts that 18 blur the boundaries between märchen and legend. For all of its surface variety, 19 this is a “unified repertoire” with a shared geographic spread and shared con- 20 texts for telling (“adults at a wake . . . men working at fishing or lumbering . . . 21 children at bedtime . . . family and guests whiling away the long hours of win- 22 ter darkness between sundown and sleep”), occasions presumably “different 23 from the occasion and audience for jokes, legends, tall tales, or personal expe- 24 rience narratives.” While other genres possess specific functions (for example, 25 “tall tales are usually competitive, deliberately drawing attention to the per- 26 formance of the teller,” McCarthy’s märchen “exist primarily for the joy of 27 narrative,” “the sake of the story” (6–7). 28 Furthermore, this corpus is thoroughly Indo-European in nature (al- 29 though McCarthy does admit that the Muslim world shares these plots). Folk- 30 lorists could, and should, worry this characterization along its edges (for ex- 31 ample, I find the functional arguments and the Eurocentric focus particularly 32 problematic), and it does not fit all of McCarthy’s materials equally well, yet lay 33 fairy-tale readers and professional folklorists alike will quickly derive from it a 34 good sense of the book’s scope. 35 One may quibble with the nuances of McCarthy’s definition, but few will 36 contest his reason for this close focus: the United States is seldom thought of as 37 a hotbed of magic tales and their closest cousins. Rather, we commonly associ- 38 ate national narrative tradition with tall tales, jokes, and legends, and we tend by 39 contrast to consider magical märchen an Old World phenomenon. McCarthy 40 S 41 R

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1 compiled this book “to present naysayers with irrefutable refutation of their ar- 2 gument that the wonder tale and its kin put down no lasting roots in America” 3 (22). His two other goals have to do with accessibility: “to provide teachers, 4 students, and families with a handy sampling of our folktale heritage,” and 5 “to equip scholars with a convenient book to consult and place alongside the 6 parallel collections from . . . the European world” (22). 7 Keeping faith with his three goals, McCarthy crafts an important book. 8 Because he wants to reach everyday readers as well as scholars, he speaks 9 openly to all. Although such plain speaking cuts some corners and will some- 10 times frustrate specialists, McCarthy does not talk down to any of his audi- 11 ences. The introductions to the various sections and chapters describe with ad- 12 mirable conciseness the historical and cultural forces that carried their tellers 13 to the New World and shaped their tales. 14 Beginning with the earliest evidence of American märchen-telling, McCarthy 15 surveys the almanacs, garlands, and copybooks that attest to the presence of 16 märchen from colonial times. Then follow three long sections devoted to the 17 most influential colonial powers: Iberian (Puerto Rico, the U.S. Southwest, 18 Louisiana Isleños, Cape Verdeans from New England), French (Louisiana 19 Creoles and Cajuns, French settlements in Missouri), and British (Lowland 20 South, African American, Gullah, Southern Mountains). The remaining chap- 21 ters present smaller samplings from Irish Americans, Pennsylvania Germans, 22 Upstate New Yorkers, and people of Polish, Norwegian, Russian Jewish, and 23 Armenian backgrounds; several European-derived märchen told by Native 24 Americans; and a concluding essay (provided by James P. Leary), complete 25 with photos, examining a Wisconsin narrator of French Canadian descent and 26 her performance of a family tale. 27 These are especially well chosen tales. The editor does his best in selecting 28 early published texts that stray little from the oral styles in which they were 29 told (although some, like Calvin Claudel’s, are recast in literary style). More 30 important, McCarthy applies his own skills as translator, fieldworker, and tran- 31 scriber to add many tales. He translates into English six Puerto Rican narratives 32 previously available only in Spanish, transcribes two of his field-collected 33 Cape Verdean tales with Kriolu phrases intact, and transcribes a performance 34 from his ten-year-old daughter. There is much previously unpublished mate- 35 rial: of the ten tales from the “Blue Ridge to Ozarks” chapter, for example, five 36 have never been previously published. 37 The notes to the tales are unfailingly helpful. The few errors are minor: for 38 example, Cajun couscous is a cornmeal mush, not a “stew” (184); Franz Boas 39 did not commission “a linguistician at the Field Museum in Chicago” to collect S 40 tales in 1915 (71). R 41

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I see only one significant problem. By insisting so strongly on the European 1 nature of his repertoire, McCarthy evokes the nineteenth-century folklorists’ 2 conviction that origin is essence, a notion that seemed to have died in the 1980s 3 with Richard M. Dorson (who insisted that African American narratives were es- 4 sentially European) and William Bascom (who spent decades documenting the 5 African provenience of African American tales). To fit his European thesis, 6 McCarthy lumps “Coastal Gullah Tradition” and “African American Tales of 7 Rural South and Urban North” into the section titled “British Tradition in the 8 South.” McCarthy’s early statement that “these tales may be quite as old in Africa 9 as they are in the Indo-European world” (8) does not quite compensate for la- 10 beling them “British” in origin, a gesture that may lead Africanists to charge 11 McCarthy with undervaluing African influences on African American narrative. 12 This one problem not withstanding, McCarthy has produced an invalu- 13 able book, the most comprehensive one-volume collection of U.S. märchen, 14 and of special merit because it strives to reach the families of narrators as well 15 as the community of scholars. McCarthy shares the mission of such great folk- 16 lorists as Vance Randolph, Leonard Roberts, and James P. Leary: to dissolve the 17 boundaries dividing the folklorist from the reader and the reader from the folk. 18 Carl Lindahl 19 University of Houston 20 21 Haunted Halls: Ghostlore of American College Campuses. By Elizabeth Tucker. 22 Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. ix + 241 pp., notes, bibliography, 23 index of tale types and motifs, general index, illustrations. 24 This interesting book moves beyond previous book publications on the 25 same topic by being not only an anthology of ghost story texts but also a rea- 26 soned discussion of what makes the genre such a widespread and vital part of 27 collegiate culture. Many of the narratives presented are firsthand accounts of 28 events that the tellers present as strong evidence for the paranormal, and 29 Tucker prudently leaves a door cracked on the possibility that they may well 30 be accurate accounts of genuinely mysterious phenomena. However, the main 31 intent of her discussion is to define motifs and patterns that are present in 32 campus legends from many geographical locations. These, she suggests, are 33 common to many performances because they encode stages in the psycho- 34 logical development of young people that occurs as part of their move from 35 adolescence to early adulthood. 36 Tucker served for many years as a “Faculty Master,” or resident faculty ad- 37 viser, in one of the dormitories at Binghamton University, making her analysis 38 especially perceptive in identifying the ways in which ghostly phenomena are 39 embedded in the context of everyday college life. She includes not only verbal 40 S 41 R

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1 texts from archival sources, but also materials distributed in computer-mediated 2 form through websites, e-mail, and, most interestingly, in “texted” versions 3 sent, a line or phrase at a time, through AOL’s Instant Messenger. She is care- 4 ful to provide necessary context, both by noting the wider distribution of mo- 5 tifs and tale types in noncollegiate folklore and also by filling out passing emic 6 references to student culture that would be unfamiliar to outsiders. 7 Most of the specific narratives presented are not migratory in nature but 8 are very specific to a particular campus or even building. Often they are 9 unique expressions of personal experiences, supported with photographic ev- 10 idence. Nevertheless, Tucker shows, they represent narrative structural pat- 11 terns that are widely distributed. When adolescents arrive at college, she ar- 12 gues, they enter a cultural environment in which these patterns already exist. 13 Rather than contacting stories, in the traditional folkloristic perspective, they 14 instead observe a process of storytelling, as modeled by the older students they 15 meet. The patterns exemplified by these (usually unique) narratives may not 16 be visibly apparent to the new students, but they provide a platform through 17 which new stories “come to the surface with subtle variations” (97). 18 The implicit patterns, not surprisingly, inspire stories that are subversive in 19 more than one way. Most obviously, they suggest realms of physical experience— 20 sights, sounds, feelings, and smells—that cannot be explained through science 21 or common sense. More fundamentally, she suggests, following Jeffrey Andrew 22 Weinstock (2004), that these narratives pass on “untold stories” that question ac- 23 cepted accounts of the history of the college or of the experiences of students. An 24 especially interesting chapter discusses the common presence of Native Ameri- 25 can spirits in college legends (particularly the common belief that a “haunted” 26 building was erected on an “Indian burial ground”). Tucker surveys the sad and 27 little-known role historically played by colleges in the pacification of tribal na- 28 tions and their often insensitive role in excavating sacred mounds, and she rea- 29 sonably suggests that such narratives prompt their audiences to “question main- 30 stream history” (181) in much the same way that revisionist historians are doing 31 in the academic works they are reading (see Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s Spectral 32 America: Phantoms and the National Imagination, 2004). Similarly, common ghost 33 stories that feature the screaming revenants of female rape/murder victims, 34 Tucker suggests, embody the actual experiences of women, whose fates demand 35 that “current students understand what happened to [them]” (135). 36 It is instructive to note that surveys show that the college experience 37 seems to make students more likely to believe in the reality of ghosts than to 38 be skeptical, and Tucker is not surprised by this trend. In this regard, she is 39 similar to Andrew Greeley, who found a similar statistical link between higher S 40 education and belief in the paranormal three decades ago; he in fact suggested R 41 that the latter might represent “a superior mode of adjusting to the cosmos”

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(Sociology of the Paranormal: A Reconnaissance, 1975: 32). Tucker likewise finds 1 that questioning consensus definitions of reality is and ought to be an integral 2 part of the college experience, for it “helps the initiate understand a new envi- 3 ronment and a new stage of life” (50). 4 Although many readers may regret that specific ghost stories familiar from 5 their own institutions were not referenced, Tucker’s illustrations are well cho- 6 sen from colleges that serve a variety of geographical areas and ethnic subcul- 7 tures. She also represents a diversity of narrative formats, ranging from quasi- 8 historical accounts in official college sources to closely described oral 9 performances by undergraduates and colleagues. The book’s nice balance be- 10 tween text and analysis keeps it from becoming either an anthology or a purely 11 abstract book, and, supplemented with the author’s recent Campus Legends 12 (2005), it makes a fine entry-level undergraduate introduction to practical 13 folklore. The frequent illustrations, often provided by the author’s talented 14 husband, also keep the book accessible to students. 15 One only regrets that the book lacks a stronger conclusion that pulls to- 16 gether her provocative suggestions. While the first chapter provides a good ad- 17 vance road map for the topics to be discussed, the book ends abruptly with a 18 mainly descriptive chapter on legend-tripping. One would have liked a fuller 19 statement of how ghost stories attempt to construct a “shadow-self” of the 20 hopes and fears of students and, indeed, a subversive “dark history” of the col- 21 lege world itself. To that extent, the book might have made, as did Simon 22 Bronner’s earlier discussion of college folklore (Piled Higher and Deeper: The 23 Folklore of Student Life, 1995), a stronger case for folklore as not only common- 24 place, but socially and psychologically essential to the undergraduate expe- 25 rience. That, in turn, might help make the case for the study of folklore as 26 likewise central to the undergraduate curriculum. 27 Bill Ellis 28 Penn State Hazleton 29 30 Haunting Experiences: Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore. By Diane E. Goldstein, 31 Sylvia Ann Grider, and Jeannie Banks Thomas. Logan: Utah State University Press, 32 2007. 270 pp., photographs. 33 Seeking spectral sites from haunted houses to haunted toilets, and exam- 34 ining genres from contemporary legends and jokes to cinema and television, 35 Haunting Experiences places its subject matter at the intersection between folk- 36 lore and popular culture, belief and fiction, asking the question: What is new 37 in contemporary ghostlore, and what is appropriation and recontextualization 38 of the old? The opening metaphor of the book captures the range of its subject 39 matter. It begins with the image of a bottle-tree wind chime set, available for 40 S sale in the gift shop of San Jose, California’s Winchester Mystery House. The 41 R

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1 collectible is modeled on the southern African American tradition of hang- 2 ing empty bottles from defoliated branches in order to distract—or perhaps 3 capture—evil spirits before they can enter the house. But like so much of the 4 book’s subject matter, it is a tradition transformed—abstracted and made sculp- 5 tural as a metal tree, hung with colorful, decorative drink receptacles that have 6 never actually been filled. The wind chimes retain some of their cultural reso- 7 nance, some of the ghosts of their past. But they are simultaneously remade 8 anew, repurposed as art, even as they are distanced from belief. 9 Like the bottle-tree wind chimes, the discussion of ghostlore in Haunting 10 Experiences oftentimes revolves around transformations through commodifica- 11 tion. In the chapter titled “Commodification and Belief,” authored by Diane 12 Goldstein, there is discussion of the influence of ghostlore on real estate and 13 tourism, and the transformation of that lore as a result of the context in which 14 it has been put to use. Goldstein discusses the impact of spectral belief— 15 stigmatization, as realtors might say—on the property market. She examines 16 its influence, writing that in some cases, the presence of ghosts might be a sell- 17 ing point, while in others, knowledge of death associated with a property 18 might keep buyers away. And she speaks similarly of hotels where haunted 19 rooms and hallways, a history of violence and death, often draw a certain kind 20 of tourist. In these cases, a transformation in the nature of haunting narratives 21 occurs as they are written into pamphlets and brochures and either toned 22 down or further dramatized for popular audiences. 23 Commerce is not the only locus for these sorts of transformations. In her ex- 24 aminations of children’s ghostlore and haunted houses, Sylvia Ann Grider shows 25 readers the intersection between ghostlore and popular culture, as well as the 26 ambiguity of genre between haunting as belief narrative and folk fiction. The lat- 27 ter is the case especially in her discussion of children. Grider outlines several 28 genres of children’s folklore, including games, jokes, and anecdotes, that utilize 29 ghostly characters without relying on belief. They are, she writes, strategies by 30 which children deal with their peculiar circumstances and learn the art of narra- 31 tive. The former—the nexus of folklore and popular culture—Grider illustrates 32 using haunted houses. She writes that our image of the haunted house—the Vic- 33 torian manse, isolated on a hillside and capped by turrets or towers—is literary 34 in origin, though it owes its ubiquity to popular representations like the Ad- 35 dams’ Family house. But it is folklore as well: though domiciles from castles to 36 suburban split levels can have haunted reputations, this image has become the 37 American de facto standard; it has gained traditionality, marking everything from 38 the telling of stories to the creation of amateur Halloween haunted houses. 39 The book’s purpose is not simply to demarcate the boundaries of contem- S 40 porary ghostlore, however. It suggests that perhaps folklorists have paid inad- R 41 equate attention to contemporary hauntings, and that these phenomena de-

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serve more and better attention. The problem here is that even as the book’s 1 authors make this argument, they cite other scholars who are currently doing 2 the very thing the authors suggest. They rely heavily on Gillian Bennett, whose 3 1999 Alas, Poor Ghost! looks seriously at experiences of the paranormal. They 4 draw on scholars like Peter Narváez and Mikel Koven, who both address the 5 meeting point of folklore and popular culture in the supernatural. And in 6 the more theoretically oriented sections of the book, they build upon the 7 experience-centered approaches that David Hufford pioneered in his 1982 8 Terror That Comes in the Night, and has continued to develop since. 9 This is not to say that the message of the book is unimportant. Haunting 10 Experiences does an excellent job of laying out some of the main problems in 11 the study of its subject matter. Specifically, it addresses the nature of belief, 12 looking at the seeming conflict between the rational and technical orientations 13 of contemporary American society and the seemingly irrational belief in super- 14 natural forces. And it does an admirable job of reiterating and developing a 15 theoretical orientation informed by Hufford’s experience-centered folkloristics. 16 It calls for the careful contextualization of belief, and for an examination not 17 only of what kinds of supernatural narratives influence people but also of how 18 those narratives are actively and creatively used. 19 As a book with three authors, each responsible for their own chapters, 20 Haunting Experiences falls somewhere between an anthology and a monograph. 21 The book is singular in its goals but seems at times to be disjointed in its 22 specifics, repeating ideas from chapter to chapter and exhibiting different lev- 23 els of theoretical engagement in different parts. Nonetheless, the book as a 24 whole is effective, acting, like the bottle-tree wind chime from the Winchester 25 House, as a sort of cultural collage—an appropriation and transformation of 26 various ideas, styles, and influences. The book’s preface suggests that its goal is 27 “to explore contemporary ghost tradition . . . with traditional forms deeply in- 28 tegrated and interwoven with new media, new technologies, new contexts, 29 and new functions,” and through its use of its different approaches—through 30 theoretical discussions mixed with examinations of ghostlore’s various trans- 31 formations—it certainly does that (22). As the authors themselves repeat 32 throughout the volume, it turns out to be an examination of the process of 33 placing “old spirits in new bottles and new spirits in old” (22). 34 Adam Zolkover 35 Indiana University, Bloomington 36 37 Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism’s Fairy Tales. By Ann Martin. 38 Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. 199 pp., bibliography, index. 39 Modernism’s Fairy Tales, the subtitle of Ann Martin’s book, raises expecta- 40 S tions of critique. Many of the artists and writers commonly associated with 41 R

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1 European modernism were attracted to what we could call fairy-tale thinking— 2 in particular, faith in a happily ever after. On the one hand there’s the polemical 3 new beginnings of the likes of futurism and imagism, the credos of which posit 4 a slate wiped clean of the accumulated works of recent history; on the other, the 5 projected ever afters of the more radically conservative modernists, for whom 6 the recently literate and urbanized masses needed herding—or worse—in the 7 interests of a new order of the elite. That these very masses might be reading 8 fairy tales, and so perpetuating the threat of a tide of popular culture, is only 9 one of the many ironies of modernism’s dangerously utopian tendencies. 10 Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed doesn’t quite follow this line, but it’s an 11 indication of the richness of the conjunction of modernism and fairy tale that 12 it should give rise to a host of interpretative possibilities. The conjunction itself 13 is wonderfully unexpected, leading this reader to imagine a series of similarly 14 counterintuitive meetings: Romanticism and the Circus? The Nouveau Roman 15 and the Folktale? Myth is a far more common pairing for modernism, stem- 16 ming from T. S. Eliot’s infamously tendentious essay on the “mythical method” 17 employed in Joyce’s Ulysses. Martin rather sidesteps this dominant paradigm, 18 but again, her attention is directed elsewhere. The central three chapters of the 19 book chart allusions to and dealings with specific canonical fairy tales in the 20 work of three modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna 21 Barnes. The rationale and justification for such a project is made at various 22 points in the course of a long and wide-ranging first chapter dealing with the 23 history of the fairy tale—in particular, during the nineteenth century, and so 24 with the genre as it was inherited by modernist artists. Martin suggests that the 25 fairy tale is more than simply one of the many worldly objects swept up in the 26 net of the encyclopedic modernist text. The fairy tale is more than just another 27 of modernism’s intertexts. In terms of content, the central tales discussed— 28 “Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Beauty and the 29 Beast,” “The Fisherman and His Wife,” and “Snow White”—“explore the indi- 30 vidual’s role in a modern urban society. They are predicated upon the dynam- 31 ics of consumerism and the subject’s performance of a gendered, classed iden- 32 tity . . . texts that reflect and convey modern attitudes towards sexuality, social 33 mobility, urbanity, and commodity culture” (17). That is, the genre of the fairy 34 tale, together with its constituent dramas, is singularly entangled in the very 35 discourses of modernity with which modernist writers were engaged, from 36 commerce and the market to fashion and the commodity, together with the 37 conflicting attractions of tradition and innovation. For Martin, “Fairy tales 38 come to reflect . . . the fluctuating experience of modernity ...and most im- 39 portantly, the agency of the subject in a modern consumer society” (40). S 40 In addition to these social and historical matters, Martin also makes a general R 41 claim for the genre of the fairy tale as peculiarly related to modernism. Beginning

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with reference to “the multiple interpretative possibilities that the texts represent 1 for modernist writers” (8), she goes on to offer a significant proposal: “It is the 2 fairy tale’s involvement in multiple contexts that marks its potential as a system of 3 reference in the work of Joyce, Woolf, and Barnes. In their instability and variety, 4 fairy tales open up a space for the reader in the text. . . . [F]airy tales are used by 5 Joyce, Woolf, and Barnes as modernist works; that is, as texts that reflect the in- 6 stability and the variability that is the experience of modernity” (12). This is quite 7 some claim, amounting to nothing less than a challenge to the aforementioned 8 dominant paradigm of modernism as constitutively mythic in orientation and as- 9 piration. It also sounds suspiciously similar to claims made on behalf of the fairy 10 tale as a quintessentially postmodernist genre. Quite how much critical mileage 11 there is in Martin’s claim is too early to say, but it’s a mark of the originality of her 12 study that it should raise such genuinely significant questions. 13 W. B. Yeats appears early on in the chapter on Joyce, but Martin is quick to 14 distinguish between forms of engagement with traditional narrative material: con- 15 trary to Yeats’s harnessing of the past in the interests of the present and future, 16 Joyce uses fairy tales “not as nationalist texts, escapist fantasies, or chronicles of 17 an essential humanity, but as powerful and pervasive narratives of turn-of-the- 18 century capitalism” (43). Joyce’s modernism still seems prescient as opposed to 19 ironically anachronistic, never less so than in his skepticism regarding the Celtic 20 Revival and its attendant discourses of tradition and authenticity; and again, his 21 interest in the European fairy tale, as opposed to specifically Irish folklore, is one 22 mark of the particular strain of modernism with which Martin is concerned. The 23 book rightly spends time on these subjects, even if they take the discussion some 24 distance from the fairy tale itself, distance that is difficult to avoid when working 25 with such a diverse and complex set of materials. The reading of Ulysses concen- 26 trates on “characters who attempt to imitate certain gendered and classed identi- 27 ties” (59), in particular Stephen Dedalus, linked with Cinderella, and Gerty 28 MacDowell, linked with Snow White. I think it’s fair to say that the links are a lit- 29 tle tenuous at times, or if not tenuous, rather loosely speculative. Martin’s account 30 of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for example, reads Peter Walsh’s visit to Clarissa as a se- 31 ries of variations on “Sleeping Beauty,” something noted by other critics. The fairy 32 tale serves as a multivalent intertext, with Clarissa as both objectified commodity 33 (Princess) viewed by Prince Peter, and combative, questioning participant. Martin 34 considers Woolf’s experience of pantomime as a possible source for her concep- 35 tion of the fairy tale as a fluid narrative, open to interpretation and strategic rede- 36 ployment, not least in terms of the provisional positioning of Sally Seton as a 37 prince for the modern age. Interesting as this is, the reliance on a strategy of sug- 38 gested comparison—Clarissa Dalloway is like Sleeping Beauty—results in a read- 39 ing that says far more about the novel than the tale, and indeed runs the risk of 40 S making the tale seem a little superfluous. 41 R

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1 This is far from true of all the individual readings in the book, however, par- 2 ticularly those devoted to the work of Djuna Barnes, the author who supplies the 3 book’s title. Barnes is a fascinating writer, someone whose work—Nightwood 4 aside—is yet to receive the level of attention lavished on the likes of Joyce and 5 Woolf. Martin acknowledges as much and does well to situate her reading within 6 the context of Barnes criticism. Her fairy-tale-oriented engagement with a range 7 of the work continues to play with a small number of key topics: the active ne- 8 gotiation of inherited social and cultural codes—in particular, norms of gender 9 and sexuality, as played out via the interpretative instability of the fairy tale and 10 the concomitant possibilities for readerly empowerment. The account of Night- 11 wood focuses in part on the figure of Matthew O’Connor and the tale of Little 12 Red Riding Hood, and on ideas of consumption, and of the correlation between 13 bodies and clothes, selves and appearances. The sight of Matthew in female 14 clothing is a wolf-as-grandmother moment, but even more so than with Clarissa 15 and Peter, Barnes’s text uses the fairy tale to frustrate and complicate gender 16 positions: “Matthew is not a female impersonator; rather, he is exploiting the 17 potential of fashion to produce a certain pleasure, though it remains uncertain 18 whether his role is to be the Wolf who will consume an awaited object of desire, 19 or, like Red Riding Hood and the Grandmother, to be the character who will be 20 consumed” (125). At stake here, again, is a character who Martin believes has 21 been able “to purchase and produce and perform [his] own [identity],” a series of 22 acts for which the fairy tale is a singularly suitable vehicle (125). 23 Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed includes more readings of individual 24 texts than I have space to consider here. Yet it also suggests a companion study 25 of modernism and the fairy tale, one focused less on the politics of gender and 26 sexuality, more on the production by modernist artists of fairy-tale art. How in- 27 teresting it would be to see a ragbag study of such works by, among others, Klee, 28 Rilke, Schwitters, Debussy, Apollinaire, Matisse, and how different the work of 29 Joyce, Woolf, and Barnes would appear when placed in this company. It is a tes- 30 tament to Martin’s wide-ranging and engaging study that it should give rise to 31 thoughts of such a sequel. The book asks us to look at the life of the fairy tale in 32 an unexpected and seemingly unconducive environment, and thereby to rethink 33 aspects of our understanding of modernist art and of the history of the fairy tale. 34 Stephen Benson 35 University of East Anglia, UK 36 37 The Postmodern Fairy Tale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction. By 38 Kevin Paul Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 198 pp., bibliography, index. 39 This scholarly book develops Terry Pratchett’s point in Hogfather: “‘All S 40 right,’ said Susan. ‘I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need fantasies to make R 41 life bearable.’ . . . NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN” (Pratchett

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270; italics in original). The back cover of Kevin Paul Smith’s The Postmodern 1 Fairy Tale: Folkloric Intertexts in Contemporary Fiction describes the book as a 2 study that “attempts to explain why fairy tales keep popping up in the most 3 unexpected places.” This attempt takes the shape of an exciting stroll through 4 the different ways that fairy tales are used in postmodern fiction. It looks at 5 how autobiography might be told through a fairy-tale mode, and the repercus- 6 sions of such a telling. Further, it discovers hidden connections between magic 7 realism and fairy tale through select readings of works by contemporary authors 8 such as Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Kate Atkinson, and Terry Pratchett. 9 Altogether, Kevin Paul Smith’s contribution to fairy-tale studies constitutes a 10 highly innovative, profound, and serious work. 11 Starting from the premise that “the history of popular fiction . . . is suf- 12 fused with fairytales” (1), Smith sets out to examine “why the fairytale has be- 13 come so important” in the last three decades. The answer to this question 14 walks the seductive, at times convoluted, path of intertextuality in its plurality 15 of meanings and for “ends which can be called ‘postmodern’” (1). Before 16 plunging deep into a somewhat structuralist analysis of fairy tale and intertex- 17 tuality, however, Smith starts by facing the problem of finding what he calls a 18 “working definition of fairytale” (2) by resorting to the work of the specialists 19 on the field: J. R. R. Tolkien, Tzvetan Todorov, Bruno Bettelheim, and Maria 20 Tatar. All of these, incidentally, seem to pose in their definitions of fairy tales a 21 fundamental problem for the author: they place magical events in an entirely 22 other world, thus aligning fairy tales with fictions of a utopian nature. Here, 23 precisely, is one of the most revealing contributions of Smith’s study: in their 24 many variations and regional versions, fairy tales become particularly histori- 25 cally determined texts and, therefore, far from universal. Within Smith’s inno- 26 vative proposal, fairy tales are regarded at once as a product of their time and 27 still relevant today because of their formulaic nature. 28 Smith devotes quite a lengthy section of the book’s introduction to the 29 critical approaches to the intertextual use of fairy tales, where he finds many 30 interesting variations, thus suggesting the vigor of this type of literary criti- 31 cism. His line of action, however, is somewhat detached from that of his pre- 32 decessors. His interests are, he claims, “more to do with the use of the fairytale 33 as a genre” (7), thus walking away from studies on particular tales (Casie 34 Hermansson’s 2001 Reading Feminist Intertextuality through Bluebeard Stories; 35 Cristina Bacchilega’s 1997 Postmodern Fairy Tales: Gender and Narrative Strate- 36 gies), considerations on individual authors (Sharon Rose Wilson’s 1993 Mar- 37 garet Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics), examinations of fairy-tale intertexts 38 in postcolonial works and feminist works ( Jack Zipes’s 1986 Don’t Bet on the 39 Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England), and 40 S other more historical/chronological approaches. The next four chapters into 41 R

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1 which the study is divided detail Smith’s original way of looking for or finding 2 fairy-tale tropes in contemporary fiction. 3 Chapter 1, “The Eight Elements of Intertextual Use of Fairytales,” pro- 4 poses a thorough investigation of the issue of intertextuality through the use 5 of the theories of Gérard Genette and Mikhail Bakhtin. Readers find a very 6 detailed compendium of the eight different elements of intertextuality that 7 provides examples for each category and underlines those that might be more 8 useful for Smith’s study. 9 Chapter 2, “Architextual/Chronotopic Intertextuality and Magic Realism 10 in Kate Atkinson’s Human Croquet,” proposes a line of approach to magic real- 11 ism that proves not only creative and ingenious, but also seductive in so far as 12 it discusses the similarities this subgenre may have with that of the fairy tale. 13 Again, Smith provides here a groundbreaking view of fairy tales by starting 14 from the premise that these are always grounded in the real and address the 15 real concerns of their audiences. 16 Chapter 3, “Metafictive Intertextuality: Defining the ‘Storyteller’ Chrono- 17 tope,” utilizes the frame story of the Thousand and One Nights to address a nar- 18 rative situation that Smith terms “the storyteller.” The attempt here is to define 19 “the storyteller” through examples of texts where one can find this storytelling 20 frame, to conclude that “the storyteller” is a postmodern trope. Smith proves 21 how storytelling is an essential human activity, and evocatively highlights the 22 importance of storytelling as a way of understanding one’s life and place in 23 the world. 24 Chapter 4, “Battling the Nightmare of Myth, Terry Pratchett’s Fairytale In- 25 versions,” shows how the fairy tale can also operate as what Roland Barthes 26 called “myth,” thus becoming a somewhat repressive mechanism. Through a 27 close analysis of the use of fairy tale in Terry Pratchett’s Witches Abroad, Smith 28 proves how fantasy literature actually works to shape and structure our under- 29 standing of the world. This stands as one of the most powerful chapters of the 30 study insofar as it theorizes the importance of narrativity and links it to post- 31 modernism. The fairy tale is proposed here as the ideal representative of fiction 32 itself, albeit not necessarily through a positive criticism, particularly in the 33 exploration of how fairy tale may turn into myth. 34 The conclusions to the study could not be more accurate and, at least for 35 this reader, more persuasive: “Fantasy and imagination are important parts of 36 being human, and we need stories to understand our place in the world” 37 (165), Smith claims, thus cleverly showing how some postmodern fictions’ use 38 of the fairy tale as an intertext demonstrates our fundamental desire for stories. 39 According to the author, as a primary oral narrative in late capitalist societies, S 40 fairy tales continue to have a hold over the imagination when subjects attempt R 41 to tell their stories, not because fairy tales are universal, as some tend to think,

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but because storytelling is. In this respect, the conclusion to the work seems to 1 echo the words of Roland Barthes in his “Introduction to the Structural Analy- 2 sis of Narrative”: “Narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every so- 3 ciety; it begins with the story of mankind. . . . It is simply there, like life itself!” 4 (251–52). In other words, as homo fabulans that we are, “humans need 5 fantasy” simply “to be human.” 6 Gemma López 7 Universitat de Barcelona 8 9 Fairy Tale Review. The Violet Issue. Edited by Kate Bernheimer. Tuscaloosa: The 10 University of Alabama Press, 2007. 160 pp. 11 This third issue of Fairy Tale Review is the first to be published in conjunc- 12 tion with The University of Alabama Press. The Blue and the Green issues both 13 preceded the current Violet Issue, and the color-coding of the issues inevitably 14 recalls Andrew Lang’s fairy books, but editor Kate Bernheimer takes a more 15 liberal approach to the fairy-tale genre than Lang did, eschewing straight re- 16 tellings and filling the issue with a literary mix in both prose and poetry. Fairy 17 Tale Review’s website (www.fairytalereview.com/index.html) features a quotation 18 from Max Lüthi, asserting that the fairy tale “gives not only pleasure, it gives 19 form and inspiration.” This inspiration is clearer in some cases than in others. 20 These pieces are not strictly tied to particular tales; many adopt imagery 21 associated with fairy tales, or an air of magic realism. The issue’s most potent 22 contribution, the first chapter of Espido Freire’s novel Irlanda (translated by 23 Toshiya Kamei), evokes no specific tale but rather the dreamlike landscape of 24 fairy tales, empty of any incident or element beyond the seemingly arbitrary 25 demands of the tale. Similarly, the protagonist’s life has been suddenly emp- 26 tied, by the death of one sister and by her parents’ need to protect another; Na- 27 talia, middle of three sisters, is sent away into the dreaming landscape, the 28 overgrown garden. Perhaps she is on a quest. Perhaps she is the princess. 29 Freire’s first chapter unfolds to the threshold of fairy tale. 30 Tracey Daugherty’s “The Sailor Who Drowned in the Desert” tells of a 31 miraculous incident outside a small church, when several men descend a rope 32 from the sky, much like Jack on his beanstalk—although neither Jack nor 33 beanstalks are mentioned. With slightly more specificity, in Lucy Corin’s “A 34 Woman with a Gardener,” a server hired for the evening performs in a seam- 35 less, almost magical ballet of perfect service, doling out hors d’oeuvres and 36 glasses of champagne, dancing at the ball but not as a guest. At the end of the 37 evening, still in a fugue state, the server is chosen by the hostess as her sexual 38 partner. The parallels to “Cinderella” are obvious if not explicit. Julie Marie 39 Wade’s “Maidenhead” takes the opposite path, her stream-of-consciousness 40 S narration invoking Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, and the Miller’s daughter in 41 R

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1 turn, as well as the Little Mermaid, Maria von Trapp, the three Billy Goats 2 Gruff, and finally the Virgin Mary refusing the angel Gabriel from a dusty farm- 3 house in Iowa. The story is tightly packed with intertextual and pop-cultural 4 references, all in service of the girl-narrator’s sexual awakening. 5 Only a few pieces revise specific tales—all are poems; all state their inspira- 6 tion in their titles: Kim Addonizio’s “Snow White: The Huntsman’s Story,” Don 7 Mee Choi’s “The Tower,” Lee Upton’s “Beastly Beast,” and Anna Marie Hong’s 8 “Cin City” with its “see-through slipper” (59). The remainder of the collection 9 of twenty-two prose and poetic pieces skirts specific reference, not so much 10 retellings or revisions as they are pastiche or even, in some cases, distant echoes. 11 For instance, Lisa Olstein’s poem “Unsated Sallow” is made up of some elegant 12 imagery bracketing some that is awkward; overall it bears only the faintest rela- 13 tionship to the fairy-tale genre, found perhaps in the evocation of magic in the 14 first lines or in the philosophical suggestion of the last line—that it is possible to 15 contain a larger space inside a smaller, recalling Emma Donoghue’s nesting-dolls 16 approach to the revision of tales in Kissing the Witch, or even C. S. Lewis’s final vi- 17 sion of the Narnia within Narnia. This is indeed only a remote relationship to the 18 genre. While the prose pieces remain grounded in the exploration or invocation 19 of tales and their themes, some of the other poems, whether literally climbing 20 through briars or seemingly tangled in their own imagery, remind us that mere 21 fantastic imagery does not a fairy tale make. 22 The generosity of Bernheimer’s definition of the fairy tale embraces a wide 23 range of pieces, and although not strictly folkloristic, it gives both writers 24 and readers the opportunity to explore the liminal edges of the form. David 25 Petruzelli contributes an exploration of storytelling at its most fundamental: 26 “You heard it so many times / you began to believe you were there / and of 27 course you were there,” he begins, making experience explicit. Petruzelli 28 doesn’t need to tell us what tale is being absorbed in this way; his poem is a 29 meta-tale, the story of telling a tale. “Brand new, you said later / trying, on your 30 own, to add to it.” 31 Kieran Suckling’s disquisition on the magical properties of toads, “Frogs,” 32 is the only nonfiction entry; although unaccompanied, it is as intriguing as any 33 two other pieces, redeploying the familiar frog motif in the service of his envi- 34 ronmental message. Ranging from Elizabethan witch trials to present-day drug 35 busts, Suckling surveys these amphibians’ place in life and literature, compar- 36 ing their abuse in fairy tales (being thrown against a wall, beheaded, burned, 37 etc.) to their abuse throughout history. But toad and frog stories are also, Suckling 38 points out, about the transformation from animal to human and thus the per- 39 meable boundaries between species. He offers an ecological perspective on this S 40 relationship, warning readers that toads are increasingly endangered near R 41 human habitation, limiting the potential for interaction, the chance of magic.

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The Violet Issue is dedicated to poet Sarah Hannah, whose work has ap- 1 peared in both previous issues, and whose three poems all evoke the dream- 2 like quality and rich imagery of fairy tales. “Progressive Dreaming” actually 3 narrates a reverie: 4 5 On your left is a steep, slatted staircase, 6 On your right, a grove of enormous zinnias 7 8 Made of embroidery thread and fenced in with rickrack. 9 Above them, a blue crepe dress hangs on a nail. 10 It is teeming with finches and pearls; 11 When it moves you hear the faint sound of flapping... 12 You know the dress will fit you but it cannot be removed. (44) 13 14 Bernheimer invokes Hannah’s poems in the editor’s note, recalling that Han- 15 nah had likened the words violet and violent in “Diana, Hunting Words” and 16 that the theme of this issue, as it emerged, seemed to be violence. It could be 17 said, however, that violence is a theme in many if not most fairy tales, and in 18 no way particular to these renditions. Instead I would like to offer the sugges- 19 tion that dreaming is the most prominent theme in this collection: Natalia 20 dreaming of her lost sister, Sagrario; the trancelike ball with its balletic servers; 21 a dazed narrator escaping into white mist; the prevalence of abandoned houses 22 and empty windows; impossible gardens, thickets, and briars. 23 This issue presents an exceptionally interesting collection of writing inspired 24 by fairy tales. In a period saturated with popular retellings of fairy tales, from 25 Walt Disney’s animation to Ellen Datlow’s anthologies, it is refreshing to read a 26 self-consciously literary collection, reminding us that the popular may also be artful. 27 The fairy tale’s remarkable vitality as a form and as an aesthetic is demonstrated 28 not just in the range this collection presents, but also in the pleasure it evokes. 29 K. Elizabeth Spillman 30 University of Pennsylvania 31 32 Enchanted. Directed by Kevin Lima. Performed by Amy Adams, Patrick 33 Dempsey, James Marsden, Timothy Spall, and Susan Sarandon. DVD. Walt Disney 34 Pictures. 2007. 35 Enchanted, Disney’s latest foray into the fairy-tale market, marks not only 36 the studio’s first animation/live-action hybrid, but also its first attempt to cre- 37 ate an original fairy tale tangentially related to its “princess” line marketed to 38 girls ages two to six. 39 The film chronicles the animated adventures of Giselle, a naïve young 40 S woman who sings to her animal friends of how much she wants to find her 41 R

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1 true love and share true love’s kiss, only to literally fall into the charming 2 Prince Edward’s lap minutes later. The two empty-headed heroes immediately 3 burst into duet and decide to marry. Edward’s evil stepmother, Queen Narissa, 4 aghast at the possibility of losing her crown to the new bride, transforms her- 5 self into an old hag, à la Snow White, and tricks the exuberant Giselle into 6 falling into a wishing well, through a vortex, and into a hellish exile in live- 7 action New York. When Pip, the talking chipmunk who is Giselle’s best friend, 8 tells Edward what has happened and he too leaps into the well in order to find 9 and rescue her, Narissa assigns her henchman to follow and poison Giselle 10 rather than let the couple reunite. 11 Giselle experiences various misadventures but is rescued from the streets 12 by Robert, a handsome divorce attorney, and Morgan, his fairy-tale-obsessed 13 young daughter. Robert scoffs at Giselle’s idealistic belief that Edward will 14 come for her and that true love is the most powerful force on earth, but at the 15 same time he finds himself touched by her optimism and charm. Giselle ig- 16 nores Robert’s cynicism about love, but takes to heart his dictum that real love 17 grows through getting to know the other person’s likes and dislikes rather 18 than simply following a story line. By the time Edward shows up, Giselle 19 and Robert have fallen for each other; however, they do what’s expected of 20 them and return to their respective partners—Giselle to Edward and Robert 21 to Nancy. 22 In keeping with Robert’s lessons on love, Giselle asks Edward to take her 23 on a date before they return to Andalasia. Meanwhile, Robert attempts to make 24 up for his recent distraction with his girlfriend by taking her out. Both couples 25 thus end up at a fancy-dress ball just as Narissa shows up in person. 26 Giselle, susceptible to Narissa’s machinations because of her grief at leav- 27 ing Robert, bites into a poison apple and falls into a coma. Robert, no longer a 28 cynic, figures out that only true love’s kiss can awaken her. When Edward’s 29 kiss doesn’t do the trick, Robert himself kisses Giselle, with Nancy’s unex- 30 pected blessing. Giselle awakens, and the two declare their love while Edward 31 and Nancy look on with bittersweet relief. 32 In a final, somewhat nonsensical twist, Narissa transforms herself into a 33 dragon, à la Sleeping Beauty, and kidnaps Robert in order to punish Giselle. 34 Though one may read this rather odd scene as an attempt at gender inversion, 35 ultimately Pip the chipmunk, not Giselle, is responsible for the evil queen’s 36 fall to her death. Nancy takes Giselle’s place as Edward’s bride, and Giselle 37 stays with Robert and Morgan in New York. They all presumably live happily 38 ever after. 39 Though the film references a variety of traditional and nontraditional fairy S 40 tales, the references are generally allusions to previous Disney productions rather R 41

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than their folklore antecedents. For example, Giselle, lost in New York City, has 1 a brief encounter with a very short, very angry man in a business suit who gets 2 trapped by the skirt of her unwieldy wedding dress. When the man snaps at 3 her, Giselle clasps her hands and cries out in happiness, “Grumpy!” referenc- 4 ing a specific character from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Visual 5 references to previous Disney features and productions, and even, in the clos- 6 ing credits, to upcoming animated productions such as The Princess and the 7 Frog, might provoke the cynic to wonder if the film is simply product place- 8 ment narrativized as never before. However, sly references to non-Disney 9 properties such as The Sound of Music and Shrek, as well as to tangentially re- 10 lated properties such as lyricist Stephen Schwartz’s Broadway smash Wicked, 11 rescue the film from straightforward feature-length commercial status and in- 12 stead reposition the film’s allusive qualities within the long-standing Holly- 13 wood tradition of homage. 14 This is not to suggest that the film is anything less than consumer-minded 15 overall. The most striking example of explicit consumerism is, not unexpect- 16 edly, aimed at children, and occurs when Giselle and Edward decide to go to 17 the fancy-dress ball. Giselle goes to Morgan for help finding a suitable gown to 18 wear. Morgan, presumably six years old, takes on the fairy godmother’s role by 19 retrieving her father’s “emergency only” credit card, and leading Giselle on a 20 shopping spree that includes the full spa treatment and purchase of a couture 21 dress. In case this wish-fulfillment fantasy is too subtle, the number of boxes 22 the two women carry out of the stores, combined with Morgan’s wistful mus- 23 ing as to whether this is what shopping with your mother feels like, visually 24 and narratively reinforce the understanding that shopping is central to the 25 mother-daughter bonding experience. 26 Despite the film’s allusive and nostalgic appeal, as well as an enjoyable per- 27 formance by Amy Adams (Giselle), Enchanted is particularly troubling in its 28 ham-fisted postfeminism. While nominally providing a message of female self- 29 actualization and empowerment through Robert’s attempts to provide his daugh- 30 ter with strong female role models such as Marie Curie, as well as through his 31 paternalistic, if well-meaning, attempts to educate Giselle about the importance 32 of getting to know a prospective partner as a person rather than relying on fairy- 33 tale plot lines involving Prince Charming and the perfect kiss, the film cues 34 viewers to the undesirability of these same messages. Morgan disdains her fa- 35 ther’s suggested role models in favor of Giselle, a real live fairy-tale princess, and 36 Robert himself is forced to realize that he is wrong about the impossibility of 37 fairy-tale romance when true love’s kiss saves Giselle from death. 38 Enchanted’s commercial success and troubling social mores will undoubt- 39 edly make it a fruitful object for critical inquiry by fairy-tale scholars interested 40 S 41 R

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1 in intertexts, film studies, and gender studies. However, the film’s cultural im- 2 pact and longevity in comparison to past and future Disney adaptations of 3 classic fairy tales is yet be determined. 4 Shannan Palma 5 Emory University 6 7 Grimm Pictures: Fairy Tale Archetypes in Eight Horror and Suspense Films. 8 By Walter Rankin. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2007. 217 pp., 9 photos, notes, bibliography, index. 10 Walter Rankin’s work represents an accessible, affectionate account of a va- 11 riety of horror films in which, despite their lack of overt fairy-tale plot, he traces 12 parallels to fairy-tale motifs and structures. He is centrally concerned with the 13 common violence he finds in modern horror films and in fairy tales by the 14 Brothers Grimm, and argues, “This violence coupled with a strong moral ties 15 the Grimm tales to our modern horror and suspense films in provocative and 16 profound ways” (13). This discussion appears to be rooted in the author’s own 17 fondness for fairy tales and for the horror film, and the somewhat anecdotal in- 18 troduction both characterizes horror in terms of Rankin’s own enjoyment of fear 19 and attempts to account for its profound effect. The book’s analysis is rooted in 20 popular culture, responding to films that speak to a wide audience rather than 21 to art-house productions, but the work’s assumptions about fairy tale or film as 22 folk-cultural capital remain largely unexamined. 23 The dual nature of Rankin’s project as both horror film and fairy-tale 24 analysis, as well as its partial address to the film fan as much as the critic, tends 25 to diversify the book’s critical weight, and its critical framework suggests that 26 the author is ultimately less concerned with fairy tale than with film itself. 27 Fairy-tale criticism is present mainly in the oft-cited works of Maria Tatar and 28 Jack Zipes, with minor references to a far from representative sample of other 29 fairy-tale critics. Such references are rather fragmented, used to support the ar- 30 gument at hand rather than offering any sustained engagement with the critics’ 31 own arguments. They are often outweighed by the work’s rather broader invo- 32 cation of film criticism and by its tendency to pad the direct comparison of 33 film and fairy tale with detailed discussion of related texts over a broad range 34 of times and genres. 35 Each of the eight chapters offers direct parallels between particular fairy- 36 tale narratives and horror films ranging from Rosemary’s Baby (1968) to the far 37 more recent What Lies Beneath (2000) and The Ring (2002). This represents a 38 choice of films that do not attempt to explicitly retell a fairy tale, but whose 39 plots Rankin proceeds to link, occasionally somewhat tenuously, to fairy-tale S 40 structures and archetypes. While each film is associated with a single, primary R 41

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fairy tale, comparisons are far more wide-ranging, encompassing related and 1 variant tales as well as popular texts, other films, legend, and mythology. This 2 makes for rich and rather satisfying reading, but the effect is also a bit scat- 3 tered: fairy tale operates as a unifying theme, not the sole concern of analysis, 4 and the discussion at times strays into a simple listing of related fairy tales 5 rather than sustained analysis. 6 The various chapters represent an interesting and not always obvious 7 choice of horror films. The first chapter is on The Silence of the Lambs (1991), 8 which gives rise to an intriguing discussion of cannibalism as a fairy-tale motif, 9 as well as a survey of Little Red Riding Hood allusions and versions in the pop- 10 ular media. Rankin’s points about literal and psychological forests, the voyage 11 of discovery and the fascination with the monster at the heart of the journey 12 are cogent and satisfying, as is the following chapter, which links Scream 13 (1996) to “Brier Rose.” Here he investigates the implications of the passive fe- 14 male heroine and the destruction of her suitors, and the sleep/death parallels 15 he finds are interesting and well sustained. The film’s self-consciousness about 16 narrative expectation also links well to fairy tale’s instantly recognizable struc- 17 tures. The third chapter explores The Ring as “Rapunzel,” a somewhat counter- 18 intuitive equation that works surprisingly well. The chapter relies appropriately 19 enough on Japanese folkloric versions of “Rapunzel” as well as adaptations of 20 Western folklore and a discussion of changeling children. Rankin fascinatingly 21 illuminates the film by equating the movie’s long-haired girl trapped in the 22 bottom of the well with the fairy tale’s long-haired girl trapped at the top of the 23 tower; the resonance is given strength by his analysis of absent/problematical 24 parent figures and the motif of the child abandoned by her mother after the 25 mother’s failure of control. 26 The second half of the book offers some more problematical discussions; 27 the fourth chapter’s exploration of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) in terms of 28 “Snow White” also includes a slightly tangential exploration of vampire motifs, 29 relying heavily on modern “Snow White”/vampire crossover texts such as 30 those by Neil Gaiman and Tanith Lee. While these share with the film a com- 31 mon interest in the motifs of blood and the mirror, Rankin’s linkage seems a bit 32 tenuous, and in his discussion the film works better and more demonstrably as 33 a text invoking vampire symbolism than it does as fairy tale. A similar tenuous- 34 ness flaws the next few chapters, which respectively link Aliens (1986) with 35 “Cinderella,” Rosemary’s Baby with “Rumplestiltskin,” and What Lies Beneath with 36 “Hansel and Gretel.” Although the discussion of Aliens offers valid parallels in 37 motifs of monstrous mothers who protect their own family to the detriment of 38 the heroine, it is somewhat distracted by its exploration of Frankenstein and man- 39 made monsters whose relationship to “Cinderella” is not immediately clear. 40 S 41 R

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1 Rosemary’s Baby is a clearer parallel with “Rumplestiltskin,” with an interesting 2 analysis of child-sacrifice folklore, devil’s bargain motifs, and the folkloric im- 3 portance of true names as well as its discussion of the various Faust narratives. 4 In equating “Hansel and Gretel” with What Lies Beneath, however, Rankin of- 5 fers only tenuous parallels, although his relocation of symbolic starvation and 6 gingerbread-house motifs is ingenious and interesting. Finally, the comparison 7 of Misery (1990) with “Mother Holle” is a stretched and slightly misguided 8 reading in which tale motifs are seen as reflecting the Grimms’ process of bor- 9 rowing and editing, and the literary and film versions of a text are seen as the 10 daughter and stepdaughter figures to the writer. Rankin’s reference to Stephen 11 King’s analysis of fairy-tale structures in film is more than somewhat belated, 12 given the similarity of King’s approach to his own. 13 It is evident that a response to this text solely as a work of fairy-tale criticism 14 would be inaccurate: Rankin’s project here is clearly broader and less rigorous, 15 and on its own terms the project succeeds very well in conveying both the au- 16 thor’s affection for these horror films and the potentially powerful operation of 17 the fairy-tale patterns they apparently invoke. Most disappointingly, however, 18 the study is apparently not interested in any overarching justification of the par- 19 allels it discovers—it generally fails to make clear whether these filmmakers are 20 consciously adapting fairy-tale motifs or if Rankin is making a broader argument 21 about the centrality of fairy-tale archetypes and structures to contemporary cul- 22 ture. This perhaps accounts for why, despite the interesting parallels discovered 23 in symbols and events, some of the comparisons seem stretched at times, and the 24 tale/film comparison cannot always be sustained. This is a readable, entertaining, 25 and frequently illuminating discussion, but it does not entirely succeed in mak- 26 ing a striking or fundamental argument about the intersections of fairy tale and 27 horror with which it is so pleasurably concerned. 28 Jessica Tiffin 29 University of Cape Town 30 31 Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage. By Sue Short. New 32 York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. xi + 196 pp., bibliography, filmography, index. 33 In Misfit Sisters, Sue Short argues that contemporary horror films share 34 several elements with fairy tales, most notably fear, fantasy, and initiation rites. 35 She suggests that “contemporary horror can be best understood as a means of 36 revisiting, and at times refuting, many of the assumptions contained in fairy 37 tales” (6). Short’s study focuses on contemporary horror films with female pro- 38 tagonists in coming-of-age stories. The female protagonists discussed are note- 39 worthy because like Little Red Riding Hood, one of Short’s primary fairy-tale S 40 references (the other being Cinderella), they “stray from the path,” which R 41 allows them to “assume narrative agency and learn valuable lessons in self-

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reliance” (ix). Short’s focus is on the development of agency, what must hap- 1 pen to achieve agency, and the ramifications of that agency. Aligning contem- 2 porary horror films to fairy tales that follow the maturation of an adolescent 3 heroine, Short sets out to demonstrate “how many female protagonists ...are 4 forced to prove themselves in horror; evaluating what risks they take, what 5 roles they play, and what such stories tell us about changing gender roles and 6 expectations” (ix). Additionally, she examines the influence of feminism on the 7 horror genre and female characters in light of a female audience. 8 As a foundational premise, Short argues against Carol Clover’s 1992 Men, 9 Women, and Chainsaws and Barbara Creed’s 1993 The Monstrous Feminine, 10 which denote a male audience for horror films and argue that the genre reflects 11 male fears of female sexuality and power (2). Short asserts that contemporary 12 horror has a prominent female audience, as evident by the increasingly com- 13 mon female protagonists and the “sympathetic” portrayal of a variety of female 14 figures in the films (2). Her assumption of a female audience allows Short to 15 explore a relatively new focus in the field—the appeal of the horror film to 16 women and what the horror genre provides for women that traditionally “fe- 17 male” genres cannot. She argues that female journeys to adulthood are “virtu- 18 ally ignored” in film and that this journey is a crucial subtext to the horror 19 genre (4). 20 The 1976 film Carrie is at the center of Short’s study, establishing a frame- 21 work from which she develops her analysis of films created in Carrie’s wake. 22 The analysis of Carrie, both in the chapter dedicated to the film and woven 23 throughout the text, builds the interesting argument that rather than an an- 24 tifeminist doctrine, the film shows the power of women and the failure of 25 patriarchal-approved models of female behavior to help women reach matu- 26 rity. Like Carrie, many of the heroines in the discussed films do not “fit in,” and 27 attempts to make them fit in (often falling into the wear-makeup-and-attend- 28 prom variety) do not work, with the female guides or heroines dying in the 29 process. Short makes an intriguing and compelling argument about how the 30 contemporary horror film that has at its center a female protagonist consis- 31 tently and continually points to the failings of patriarchy in providing young 32 women productive models of maturity. Short argues that Carrie’s legacy is an 33 “interrogation of the failures of patriarchal myths (including religion and ro- 34 mance), inaugurating a mode of questioning that has endured in horror’s sub- 35 sequent interest in misfit females attempting to negotiate their place in the 36 world” (15). She demonstrates that though there are many misogynist ele- 37 ments in contemporary teen horror (and she cites all of the common criti- 38 cisms), the genre itself is more nuanced and reflective than a simple anti- or 39 pro-woman label can provide. Rather than viewing horror films as a way to 40 S work out male anxieties about women, she argues that contemporary horror 41 R

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1 examines the possibilities for female identity and agency (both patriarchally 2 approved models and those that are not). 3 Short’s work contributes very little that is new to the field of fairy-tale 4 studies, and her discussion of fairy tales is a survey of readily available infor- 5 mation that should be recognizable to fairy-tale scholars. Her book would be 6 primarily useful for those studying horror, as that is where she makes her most 7 compelling and unique claims. Fairy tales are invoked as a framework for her 8 analysis of female-centered horror films, and although this does provide an in- 9 teresting context to the themes she discusses, she does not discuss the films as 10 fairy-tale films or explore the fairy-tale elements of the films in depth. Rather, 11 the fairy-tale motifs and studies mentioned provide a starting point for her 12 main argument about the roles of women in horror. While it is clear how fairy 13 tales can aid studies of the horror genre, it is less clear what fairy-tale scholars 14 can take from horror to apply to the study of fairy tales. 15 Missing from Short’s study is the mention of other types of contemporary 16 horror. The popular trend in torture-focused horror films is ignored, as are 17 other thrillers that do not fit with her argument. While there is no room in her 18 already overpacked work for a discussion of other films, a brief explanation of 19 why this torture-porn trend in contemporary horror is irrelevant to her discus- 20 sion would help situate within other subgenres of contemporary horror the 21 female-centered trend she analyzes. Her not recognizing the other trends im- 22 plies that the female-centered film is contemporary horror rather than being 23 one type of contemporary horror. 24 Short’s individual analysis of the films shows her mastery of the material 25 and immense familiarity with her texts. The text is divided into six chapters 26 in addition to the introduction and conclusion. Chapter 1, “Telling Tales: 27 Fairy Tales and Female Rites of Passage Narratives,” uses the work of Cristina 28 Bacchilega, Elizabeth Wanning Harries, Maria Tatar, Marina Warner, and Jack 29 Zipes to connect the horror genre to fairy tales, establishing a similarity in the 30 emphasis on female rites of passage and drawing on a tradition of female sto- 31 rytellers and audience. In chapter 2, “Sex and the Final Girl: Surviving the 32 Slasher,” Short analyzes the development of the slasher cycle in horror and the 33 evolution of the Final Girl into a single mother. She focuses on Halloween, A 34 Nightmare on Elm Street, the Scream trilogy, Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, and 35 Halloween H2O. In chapter 3, “Maternal Monsters and Motherly Mentors: 36 Failed Initiations in Carrie and Carrie II,” Short counter reads the Carrie films 37 for their sympathetic and feminist inclinations. The fourth chapter, “Misfit Sis- 38 ters: Female Kinship and Rivalry in The Craft and Ginger Snaps,” examines the 39 use of witch and werewolf lore to explore female relationships. In the only S 40 chapter to discuss a television series, chapter 5, “Fighting Demons: Buffy, R 41 Faith, Willow, and the Forces of Good and Evil,” examines the roles of the

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three most powerful women in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer in terms of mother- 1 daughter relationships and the complexity of the line between heroine and 2 villain. Chapter 6, “Demeter’s Daughters: Wronged Girls and the Mother 3 Avenger,” examines the role of adult women as heroines (all of the other chap- 4 ters look at teens) as an interrogation of what constitutes a “good” mother in 5 the films What Lies Beneath, The Gift, The Ring, and The Ring Two. The book’s 6 conclusion, which presents the most succinct argument about the possibilities 7 for women in horror, also analyzes Dark Water as a horror film that fails to 8 demonstrate the potential of female power. 9 Short’s clear prose and steady method of building her argument level by 10 level results in a more nuanced and controlled conclusion than her introduc- 11 tion suggests. Her arguments are easy to follow as she carefully connects each 12 chapter to the next, and the book would work well in an introductory course 13 exploring the topic. Ultimately, Short attempts to reclaim horror films for 14 women, and her study makes great strides in doing just that. Misfit Sisters com- 15 plicates the dominant understanding of women in horror films by arguing that 16 the genre illustrates far more varied and nuanced depictions of female power 17 and maturity than most other genres allow. 18 Christy Williams 19 Hawai‘i Pacific University 20 21 Le conte en ses paroles: La figuration de l’oralité dans le conte merveilleux 22 du Classicisme aux Lumières. Edited by Anne Defrance and Jean-François Perrin. 23 Paris: Editions Desjonquères-L’Esprit des Lettres, 2007. 504 pp. 24 The volume under review presents the proceedings of the second confer- 25 ence titled Le conte en ses paroles: le dire et le dit dans le conte merveilleux de l’âge 26 Classique (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles), which took place at the University of Grenoble 27 3–Stendhal, September 22–24, 2005. The thirty-two presentations, put to- 28 gether by Anne Defrance and Jean-François Perrin, join a larger group project 29 directed by Perrin and focused on the subject of “The Fairy Tale in the Seven- 30 teenth Century: The Wonder Tale and the Baroque Culture of the Voice” (Centre 31 National de la Recherche Scientifique, LIRE, University Grenoble 3, 2002–2006). 32 Perrin opens his preface to the volume by quoting the initial challenge for this 33 original research: “At a time . . . when the notion of ‘oral literature’ was widely 34 circulating and especially attached to the mighty revival of tale-telling as a so- 35 cial practice, it seems necessary to re-think this notion in a critical way, by re- 36 viewing the overpowering of speech by writing and the special capacity of lit- 37 erature to produce ‘fictions of presence.’” Orality and literature are thus 38 perceived as complementary notions. 39 The studies present in this volume cover the period from the end of the sev- 40 S enteenth century to the end of eighteenth century. These two centuries in France 41 R

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1 represent the golden era when fairies became fashionable among the members of 2 a social elite who attended the “salons.” This elite was often presided over by 3 women, who maintained an important role as tale-tellers. Combined with the art 4 of conversation, this tale-telling drew its themes and techniques from three dis- 5 tinct sources: oral tradition, literary tradition, and translated oriental tales. The 6 volume’s objective, as Perrin defines it in his preface, is to investigate the repre- 7 sentations of orality in wonder tales (fairy tales and oriental tales) by employing 8 a resolute literary perspective. In other words, the volume purports to examine 9 language and style, since literary fairy tales were written in order to be read. 10 The volume is organized into three large sections: (1) Fictions de voix (Voice 11 fictions), (2) Co-énonciation et mise en scène (Co-enunciation and staging), and 12 (3) Le corps des mots, le jeu des récits (The body of words, the playful ways of nar- 13 ration). The volume also combines several approaches, which all focus on the 14 transformations of orality and literary enunciation, with an emphasis on the 15 connection between classical fairy tales and dramaturgy or staging. 16 The first part (Fictions de voix) brings to the foreground the tale’s and the 17 classic tale-teller’s polyphony. In their focus, numerous papers straddle orality 18 and literature, as they examine the convergences with and divergences from 19 other literary genres of the fairy tale as a (sub)genre; for instance, several pa- 20 pers compare fairy tales with theater, which also derives from oral discourse. 21 Lewis C. Seifert opens the volume with an important essay on the history of 22 literary critics, from seventeenth-century tale-tellers to twentieth-century histori- 23 ans, philologists, and anthropologists, who have concerned themselves with clas- 24 sic fairy tales. The essential point of this retrospection is to depict the evolution of 25 orality itself as a concept, and to comment on its complexity and polysemy. 26 Jean-Paul Sermain approaches the fairy tale as a subgenre of the wider 27 genre of the novel and examines the features that connect it with orality by 28 looking at three synchronic models of writing—those of Charles Perrault, An- 29 toine Galland, and Anthony Hamilton. Christine Noille-Clauzade follows the 30 same interconnecting direction in her paper and relates fairy tales to historic 31 and chivalric novellas. Françoise Gevrey associates parodic tales with a typol- 32 ogy of comedy through a detailed presentation of the use of the terms bavard 33 (talkative) and babillard (babbling), introduced into the fairy tales’ vocabulary 34 from the domain of the oral. Julie Boch explores the same subtle interconnec- 35 tion through the example of the Comte de Caylus. Raymonde Robert examines 36 the rare cases of French fairy-tale collections of the eighteenth century that 37 apply a judicial rhetoric as a frame narrative. The importance of frame narra- 38 tives is also illustrated by Anne Defrance, who explores how the initiating 39 function of the frame complements the tale’s latent plot. S 40 Christelle Bahier-Porte analyzes a counterexample of popular success R 41 through the “modalisation” of a normative discourse. Sophie Reynard focuses on

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the poetic allegory and the social status of the scholarly woman tale-teller in the 1 Parisian salons of the seventeenth century. Jean Mainil explores the polymorphy 2 of wonder speech in seventeenth-century fairy tales, which he classifies into three 3 types: the popular speech in accordance with its oral origin; male heroic speech in 4 contrast with female silence; and the socialite discourse of talkative women tale- 5 tellers. Ruth B. Bottigheimer revisits in a vivid way the works of Charles Perrault 6 and contests previous assumptions formulated during the nineteenth and twenti- 7 eth centuries about the oral origins of some of his famous fairy tales. She demon- 8 strates through a subtle comparison with the works of Basile and Straparola that 9 fairy-tale discourse can also constitute a “contemporary literary reformulation.” 10 The second part (Co-énonciation et mise en scène) stresses the dramatic dy- 11 namics and stage transformations of literary tale-telling. Manuel Couvreur dis- 12 plays an elaborate comparison between contes de fées and “poetic art”—in the 13 sense of drama, even mimetic—and demonstrates the esthetic contribution that 14 Galland brought into French classicism with his translation and adaptation of 15 the Arabian Nights. Jean-François Perrin undertakes a comparison between 16 Galland’s Nights and Hamilton’s tales in order to demonstrate a paradoxical in- 17 terchangeability between silence and speech, and its correspondence to a fluid 18 relationship among the tale-teller, the listener, and the commentator. Those 19 traits, concludes Perrin, invest Hamilton’s tales with a new dramatic function. 20 Aurelia Gaillard brings to the foreground the narrative similarities of two tales 21 by Denis Diderot, “L’oiseau blanc” and “Les bijoux indiscrets”; according to this 22 interesting reading of Diderot’s tales, this discourse acquires a metaphorical 23 function of sensuality, thus tale-telling can be considered as a sensual mise- 24 en-scène. Michele Bokobza Kahan investigates the “scenography” of libertine 25 tales, exploring the state of enunciation beyond parody. Marie-Françoise Bosquet, 26 through an exploration of the feminine speech in Les Mille et Une Heures by 27 Thomas-Simon Gueulette, perceives a mise-en-scène of orality that conforms to 28 the social reality of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Another text by 29 Gueulette is treated by Carmen Ramirez, who comments on the tale-teller’s art 30 and on the narrative dynamics of his dialogue. Catherine Ramond investigates 31 fairy-tale adaptations in theater that follow the imperatives of the theatrical gen- 32 res to which fairy tales may adapt, thus leading to a deconstruction of the won- 33 der tale’s symbolism. Her revelatory conclusion summarizes this procedure: 34 “the more the fairytale’s meaning is lost, the more it is necessary to quote it end- 35 lessly.” Martial Poirson presents the example of Petit Poucet, in which Carmon- 36 telle was inspired by Perrault, and investigates the theatricality of the dramatic 37 tale by comparing it to dramatic proverbs. He thus demonstrates the ambiva- 38 lent theatrical transposition of oral wonder tales according to a triple operation: 39 literary, dramatic, and scenic. Nathalie Rizzoni examines verbal transformations 40 S of fantasy into spectacular action in eighteenth-century theater. In a similar 41 R

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1 direction, Régine Jomand-Baudry explores speech transformations from liber- 2 tine tales into spectacular effect and “bouffe” parody in vaudeville comedies. 3 Benjamin Pintiaux explores the links between wonder tales and opera ballet, a 4 dramatic genre contemporary with the revival of tale-telling. He examines the 5 transformations of the fantastic element into libretto and choreography, using 6 illustrative examples from the third entry of Fêtes de Polymnie. 7 The third part of the text (Le corps des mots, le jeu des récits) brings to the 8 foreground formal aspects of fairy tales, such as vocabulary, language, and style. 9 Philippe Hourcade investigates the influence of fantasy and the contribution of 10 the historical context to this vocabulary as well as the peculiarities and neolo- 11 gisms applied by Madame d’Aulnoy in her Contes. Vincent Verselle explores 12 “the power of speech to construct characters,” as per Tzvetan Todorov’s definition. 13 Through the use of extraordinary characters in L’Oranger et l’abeille, by Madame 14 d’Aulnoy, he illustrates the “semiosic function” of reported speech. Beyond fairy 15 tales and parody of the 1740s, Aurélie Basso undertakes a detailed presentation 16 of the subversive effects of discourse. Noémie Courtès demonstrates that “fairy 17 lore” (féerie) provides a pretext for a society’s conversation. Henri Coulet takes 18 as an example Nicolas Rétif and his Contes Bleus in order to demonstrate the 19 links and exchanges between orality and literature in the language and style of 20 his tales. Nadine Decourt, both a comparatist and an anthropologist, proposes a 21 double “reading/hearing” of Veillées de Thessalie by Madame de Lussan. Sophie 22 Latapie approaches the tales by Madame Leprince de Beaumont in terms of their 23 pedagogical and Christian aspects. Richard Gossin, as a theologian and a story- 24 teller, subtly revisits the question of religious connotations and offers a system- 25 atic comparison of biblical texts, Christian apocryphal texts, and contemporary 26 tales, which all bring into the foreground the Christmas miracle. In order to 27 demonstrate the passage from orality into literature, Marie-Agnès Thirard un- 28 dertakes a comparative approach to two African oral tales and a literary version 29 of the same tale “told” by Madame d’Aulnoy. 30 Henri Touati closes the volume with a return to the present and to the revival 31 of storytelling today, which started in the 1970s. He dynamically associates the art 32 and social function of modern storytellers with the collections of the nineteenth 33 and twentieth centuries and that period’s great works of classification. 34 Le conte en ses paroles, principally of literary, historical, and stylistic inter- 35 est, brings together a range of highly illustrative and well-argued scholarly pa- 36 pers. It is an essential contribution to the study of literary tales in association 37 with their oral substratum. 38 Marilena Papachristophorou 39 Hellenic Folklore Research Centre (Academy of Athens) S 40 R 41

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Early Yiddish Texts, 1100–1750. Edited by Jerold C. Frakes. Oxford: Oxford Uni- 1 versity Press, 2004. lxxvii + 889 pp. 2 Un beau livre d’histoires: Eyn shön mayse bukh; Fac-similé de l’editio prin- 3 ceps de Bâle (1602). Edited, introduced, and translated by Astrid Starck-Adler. 4 Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2004. Two volumes: cxxxiii + 875 pp. 5 For the better part of a thousand years, the majority of European Jews 6 dreamed, thought, worked, and loved in Yiddish; and though the multilin- 7 gualism that characterized European Jewish life generated a correspondingly 8 complex literary system, it seems fair to suggest that when fables, epics, won- 9 der tales, and other stories reached the vast majority of Jewish eyes and ears, 10 they did so in the culture’s working vernacular, not the high-status Hebrew 11 that was the lingua franca of all elite, sacred productions. 12 The critical study of Yiddish life and literature in general, and particularly 13 in the premodern period (roughly before 1750), was tragically interrupted in 14 the twentieth century by the Holocaust and by Stalinist repression; among the 15 vast roll of victims to Nazism and Communism were many of the brightest lights 16 of Yiddish scholarship. In recent years, the field has only just begun to recover 17 some of its momentum—aided immeasurably by the widespread acceptance of 18 Jewish studies on campuses in North America, Europe, and of course Israel— 19 though with certain notable exceptions, the vast majority of that scholarship 20 has focused on either linguistic matters of the elite productions of a newly sec- 21 ularized, cosmopolitan, engaged group of writers who flourished from the 22 1880s to the outbreak of the Second World War. As a result, some of the most 23 basic research in the field of early modern Yiddish literature (critical editions, 24 bibliographic spadework, basic analysis) remains a desideratum. 25 This is beginning to change, thanks in no small part to the scholars whose 26 work is reviewed here. Jerold Frakes’s earlier work on alterity and ideology in 27 Old Yiddish studies showed him to be a subtle and theoretically sophisticated 28 detective of the dizzyingly and dazzlingly complex agendas behind the schol- 29 arship on premodern Yiddish over the last several centuries. In recent years, 30 however, he has turned to immeasurably assisting the work of others in study- 31 ing the period’s literary output. With this mammoth anthology of early Yiddish 32 texts, along with his careful translation and revision of Jean Baumgarten’s sem- 33 inal Introduction to Old Yiddish Literature, Frakes has done more to revitalize the 34 study of Yiddish before the modern period in English-speaking countries than 35 any other scholar. 36 Frakes’s purpose in compiling Early Yiddish Texts is not, primarily, for the 37 uninitiated; the texts themselves remain untranslated (though the herculean 38 efforts in rendering difficult-to-read manuscripts and no-longer-familiar ty- 39 pographies should not go unnoted), and many of the entries are excerpts 40 S from longer works. Surrounded as they are, however, by introductory notes, 41 R

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1 substantive bibliographies of extant criticism and research, and a useful index 2 that categorizes the works by genre as well as by chronology, the anthology 3 will remain the essential starting point for all research in the field for decades, 4 if not indeed longer. 5 Frakes’s careful choices remind readers, scholars, and casual skimmers of 6 some of the cornerstones of new (and, in some cases, old) research on pre- 7 modern Yiddish literature; space allows us to focus primarily on three here. 8 First and foremost is the wide variety of genres that composed that literature, 9 which allow it to speak to scholars in as many fields as there are disciplines 10 that study the age. Frakes includes (among other genres) Bible translations and 11 paraphrases, private letters, books of customs, dramas, medical texts, epics, 12 morality books, travel guides, legal texts, fables, glossaries, and newspapers. 13 Almost all of these works (and others like them; Frakes makes no claims for 14 the exhaustiveness of the anthology) are grossly understudied and have much 15 to offer the scholar of Jewish studies. 16 They are also of value to scholars of non-Jewish studies, which is the sec- 17 ond point. Yiddish texts, sacred and secular alike, had authors and readers 18 subject to vicissitudes of a minority culture in a larger literary society, and cer- 19 tain efforts at cultural insularity notwithstanding, the Yiddish texts represented 20 in the anthology provide testament to the rich and complex cultural inter- 21 change between Jewish and surrounding societies in the form of adapted 22 chivalric epics such as the Bovo-bukh, or works like the Shmuel-bukh or Doniel- 23 bukh, whose retellings of the biblical stories in Kings and Daniel sup both from 24 internal rabbinic tradition and the topoi of medieval narrative. This is to say 25 nothing of Yiddish versions of Arthurian tales, Aesopian fables, and other works 26 whose external origins, depending on context and case, were widely known, 27 deliberately occluded, or forgotten over the centuries. 28 The cultural interchange exemplified by this Yiddish literature—and that 29 literature itself—became the substance of heated debate, particularly with the 30 rapid progress of print and the concomitant spread of literacy in the early 31 modern period. Rabbinic leaders, particularly toward the end of the sixteenth 32 century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, became concerned 33 about Yiddish printers’ success with chivalric adaptations of undoubted enter- 34 tainment value and doubtful moral worth, yielding a “counter-revolution” of 35 edifying entertainments in the decades to come. The Mayse-bukh, whose 1602 36 Basel editio princeps has now been masterfully presented in a facsimile edition 37 with French translation and notes by Astrid Starck-Adler, was one of that rev- 38 olution’s broadest shots across the bow. 39 This book, which is vital to the history of Yiddish literature (it was one of S 40 the most reprinted books in Yiddish literary history until the modern period), R 41 consists of more than two hundred stories, largely culled from Talmudic sources,

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medieval pietistic tales, and contemporary manuscript story collections. Starck- 1 Adler, following on a comparatively rich seam of German and Israeli scholar- 2 ship over the last centuries, has done wonderful work in not only providing 3 the most definitive sourcing and structuring of the book’s stories, but also, in a 4 seminal introductory essay, giving a great deal of background about the book’s 5 compiler, its place of publication, and its place in the contemporary literary 6 landscape. The translation does its readers the service of restoring the silent 7 omissions of Moses Gaster’s earlier bowdlerized English translation, thus al- 8 lowing the text to speak vibrantly and occasionally surprisingly on its own. 9 This leads me to the third point: the sophisticated and surprising relation- 10 ship between “sacred” and “secular” texts in the early modern Yiddish literary 11 landscape. It is, of course, a commonplace that these categories had very dif- 12 ferent meanings, if indeed any meaning at all, than those they have today, but 13 modern readers are nonetheless often surprised at the words, topics, themes, 14 and behaviors that appear in ostensibly moralistic books or in the mouths of 15 characters that have been refined and domesticated through centuries of his- 16 tory and hagiography. Starck-Adler, through her translation, allows the Mayse- 17 bukh to speak for itself, and scholars in the fields of both Jewish literature and 18 European studies can be glad to have a major new text in an accessible and 19 approachable format. 20 Overall, then, one can hope that these major works of scholarship launch 21 the articles, theses, and general reconceptualization of Jewish, and even Euro- 22 pean, life and literature that they deserve to; certainly, if the field continues to 23 grow, as it gives every evidence of doing, many present and future scholars will 24 be grateful to Frakes and Starck-Adler as a result. 25 Jeremy Dauber 26 Columbia University 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 S 41 R

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